Salvatore Babones is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney. He is the author or editor of ten books and more than two dozen academic research articles. His research covers the macro-level structure of the global economy with a particular focus on China. Babones writes extensively on international affairs and is a member of Foreign Affairs magazine's China Brain Trust. He writes a monthly column on China for Al Jazeera English and is a frequent contributor to The National Interest and the Asian Review of Books.

After a meteoric rise, China's once inexorable growth has come to a screeching halt. With it ends China's dream of establishing a new tianxia ('harmonious order') in Asia with China at its centre. Salvatore Babones provides an up-to-date assessment of China's economic problems and how they are undermining China's challenge to the Western-dominated world order. As China's neighbours and many of its own most talented people look to the United States to ensure their security and prosperity, global power is slowly but surely consolidating in a twenty-first century American Tianxia. A closely argued antidote to defeatist accounts of Western decline, this book tells the story of how liberal individualism has become the leitmotif of the American Tianxia, an emerging world-system in which people of all nationalities seek a share in the economic, cultural, and political system that is America writ large.